A business system is composed of many resources including a number of apparatuses, such as servers, storages, and network equipment; and programs, such as operating systems (OS), middleware, and applications installed on the apparatuses. In a situation where a plurality of such business systems are in operation, a data center carries out operational work, such as monitoring and maintenance, of the business systems.
In recent years, Runbook Automation (RBA) has attracted attention as a technology for advancing operations automation by expressing operational work of business systems in workflows. RBA is expected to have various effects including reduction in operation load by automating simple tasks, reduction of human errors, and reduction in operational costs.
As for technology related to workflows, there is provided, for example, a data flow management system for managing, in a management table, access rights given to individual users who perform tasks on documents and causing, when a flow manager creates a document flow on a definition screen, only users having access rights to a document concerned to be defined in the document flow with reference to the management table.    Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2003-256630
In the case where a first and a second workflow individually including tasks using the same resource are executed, the tasks of the individual workflows, using the same resource, are carried out in a mutually exclusive manner. Assuming for example that a failure has occurred in a task of the first workflow, using the resource, stopping the execution of the first workflow and then transferring the exclusive right to the second workflow allows the operation of the second workflow to continue. However, simply stopping the execution of the first workflow may subsequently lead to a failure when the tasks of the second workflow, using the resource, are executed.